Dr. Shenila Khoja-Moolji is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. Her work examines the interplay of gender, race, religion, and power in transnational contexts, particularly in relation to Muslim populations.
Dr. Khoja-Moolji is the author of Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia. She combines historical and cultural analyses with ethnography to examine the meaning of the “educated girl” figure in colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan. Through her work, she has deepened the scholarship on the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns. Dr. Khoja-Moolji argues that advocacy for women’s and girl’s education is not simply about access, but more concerned with producing ideal Muslim women and girls with specific relationships to patriarchy, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. As such, the discourse on girl’s and women’s education also encompasses issues in class relations, religion, and the nation.
Chair: Ali Asani, Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures, Harvard University
